(This little ditty is motivated by a lot of things going on. Too many to point to. So much for explaining its motivation.)
It’s hard to motivate one person - most adolescents, for example - to do things. It’s damn hard to get more than a few folks to do anything. Yet, without anyone trying or scolding, look at the number of blogs out there.
The blog phenomenon – like previous large-scale net phenomena – email, the web, dot.com mania - is moving with a rapidity and broad, self-organizing impetus that can’t easily be explained.
Maybe explanations are beside the point. When we explain, don’t we really mean, “explain away?”
Where is ''away?''
When something is explained, where does the aura of its mystery go? Does the wonderment die, or does it live on in some underworld of undead cares and questions and slain marvels?
Perhaps better not to ''explain blogging.''
In the early days, people who knew how the Internet worked 'were mainly using it to fuck off We thought it was important to fuck off.'
Publishers Weekly, (on Christopher Locke's Bombast Transcripts).
Whatever is driving all this energy dwarfs the nostrum puppets: “A cheap form of vanity press;” “a fad that is already fading;” ''a nifty way for professionals to keep in touch,'' etc.
Does anybody find media punditry satisfying? Does it account for the power, the mobilization, the sweep, the energies, the scope, the mania of blogging? Whatever is “behind” blogging, it's larger than what we normally think of as motivation. Maybe something like this -
10. A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device -- everyone else's brain and the whole net connected. Weblogs let you watch people learning at lightning speed. Awesome to witness.
Halley Suitt. (...Wait a second, I'm Halley Suitt...)
Or this -
The mists and films that mortal eyes involve,
Purge from your sight the dross, and make you see
The shape of each avenging deity. Aeneid II. Also awesome to witness.
Human motivation is one of the hardest things to explain. Too quickly, we make ignorance go ''away.'' Professional publishing - i.e., Non-blogging - cannot abide ignorance, which also riles professional expertise. Might help to look at that. Buy a clue from a child, a fool, a jester, a monkey. They’re stupid, they’ll sell it to us cheap. Maybe we can just rip it right off of them, but we won’t. Because we’re not stupid.
